Too much of the man

The current RHA retrospective sums up Robert Ballagh's career brilliantly. Unfortunately, his illustrations just don't do it for Billy Leahy

Robert Ballagh: A Retrospective. RHA, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2. 01 661 2558, www.royalhibernian academy.com until 22 October

Robert Ballagh is an unfunny cartoonist. He is also a fine illustrator, a talented portrait painter, a successful theatre set designer, a shameless plunderer of art history, an accomplished copyist and a controversial, part-time political commentator. But he is definitely an unfunny cartoonist and, given the evidence in the retrospective of his work at the Royal Hibernian Academy, a quite self-obsessed one at that.

Yet with an accessible, unchallenging body of work, Ballagh has, during a 40-year career, managed to become one of Ireland's most well-known if divisive artists. Though when former director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art Declan McGonagle suggested a few years ago on the RTÉ programme The View that Ballagh was not so much an artist as an illustrator, it was hard to argue with him.

Ballagh loves his visual ironies, aesthetic gags, trompe l'oeil games and making incalculable references to Republican politics, art history and, of course, his own work and himself. The latter is such a feature that his countless canvas cameos become a major burden on the patience. Throughout all these little references and quotes there is undoubtedly a strong element of humour – just not a very amusing one. At other times, his visual tricks and puns can come across as being show-off smart and, at their worst, even self-congratulatory.

In Ciaran Carty's essay on the exhibition, he tells how, months before the retrospective, Ballagh had built a model of the show, complete with miniature versions of each of his works. But even if self-reference and self-reverence can sometimes look very similar, Ballagh can be partly forgiven for such forward and obsessive planning, considering the complexity with which he has curated his exhibition.

A labyrinth of rooms has been constructed within the main space of the RHA, with the viewer led through his work in a deliberate order, once they have passed a neo-classical façade that stands as an early challenge to good taste. Inside, borrowed aesthetics and visual language inform all the works. Political imagery is present from the start, but rarely is it strongly editorialised, with parallels merely alluded to and subtly suggested. But without preaching, Ballagh still leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie.

As the early pop art influence wanes, a hyper-realist or photorealist aesthetic becomes more prevalent, with the '...and a...' series of paintings from the early 1970s providing the crossover. This body of work is also the most successful and interesting period in Ballagh's career, even if the deliberately flat, two-dimensional nature of the works has not aged too well.

Portraiture, however, soon pushes to the fore in tandem with the development of his hyper-realist style, as Ballagh's talent as a painter gets an uninterrupted chance to impress. The use of props in a number of works subtracts from the paintings though, by adding a forbidding and unplanned element of kitsch – something which peaks later on in the works borrowed from Dermot Desmond's collection.

The labyrinth concept plays a key role in the success of the show by reducing the usually-huge space of the RHA and quietly echoing Ballagh's work as a set designer. Less subtle is the design area at the back of the space, which fails to separate Ballagh's design work from his paintings, to detrimental effect.

Overall, however, it must be stated that the RHA's retrospective sums up Ballagh's career brilliantly and is sure to divide visitors right down the middle. If the "Fuck The Begrudgers" teeshirt slogan in his 2004 self-portrait, 'Still Crazy After All These Years', is anything to go by, Ballagh is unlikely to care too much about my ilk.